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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28691412">amber skies</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/beneathyourbravery/pseuds/beneathyourbravery'>beneathyourbravery</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>NCT (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Horror, Haunting, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Magical Realism, Marjorie AU, this is taylor swift's fault</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 07:40:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,537</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28691412</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/beneathyourbravery/pseuds/beneathyourbravery</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><em>“Write about me”</em>, Donghyuck begs rhythmically in the tune he drums against Mark’s liver, <em>“tell them there was nothing but you and I”</em>, and so Mark’s blood turns into black ink as he pours it over yellowish pages, fire to burn, ashes to come.<br/> </p><p>  <em>What died didn't stay dead</em><br/><em>You're alive, you're alive in my head</em></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee, Lee Jeno/Na Jaemin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>63</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>amber skies</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this was going to be a silly little drabble and the only thing i can say is that i am So Sorry</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>If asked about it, Mark’s friends would say he’s gone insane—sick with grief, still holding onto a broken thread tied to a ghostly train that passed by too long ago.</p><p>Nobody asks, though, and so the deed stays silent; quiet witnesses to a quieter death, the saddest kind of life-ending supernova wilting right before their eyes.</p><p> </p><p>Jaemin shows up at Mark's door with a medium-sized cardboard box in his hands and the dark cloud of dread casting an obscure shadow over his pained face.</p><p>“I believe this is yours,” he tells Mark, “I told his mother that was your drawer in his room.”</p><p>His voice cracks twice in his sentence and the purple bags underneath his eyes, adorned by bloody rivulets of thin red veins exploding into exhaustion, give away the fact that he’s already gone three days without sleep. Next to him, Jeno’s throat is closed tight under the unforgiving fist of despair, and he’s left weeping silently at the exchange—but his hand is tight on Jaemin’s shoulder, shield and shelter in the storm; stone lighthouse where there is shore, relief at the end of the dark road.</p><p>It’s simply another cruel reminder of all the things Mark has lost.</p><p>“Can’t I have anything else,” Mark’s scratchy, barely-there voice fails at tilting into a question, at the sight of the packet of condoms, the three basic t-shirts worn thin to sleep and the five pairs of briefs he finds folded inside the box, “one of his shirts, at least the pictures on his desk?”</p><p>Jaemin can’t meet his eyes as he croaks, “his parents would not let me keep anything for you,” another dagger going through the flesh of Mark’s rotting soul, smashing into dust the wilting pieces of his broken heart, “but I managed to sneak out a pillow, I told them it was mine.”</p><p>Jeno hands Mark the plastic bag where they brought it, and when tears fall from his eyes to roll over Mark’s hand they sizzle, burning hot against frozen skin. “Thanks,” Mark croaks, and Jeno only sniffles and gives him a small nod of the head.</p><p><em>Should've kept every grocery store receipt</em>, the voice in the back of his head sing-songs, <em>cause every scrap of you would be taken from me</em>.</p><p>They don’t say goodbye when Jeno and Jaemin turn their backs to Mark to walk away from his apartment, and he is thankful, for he does not think he’d be able to stand yet another farewell.</p><p>Winter bites cold at the apples of his cheeks and leaves his lips chapped and dotted by drying crimson wounds, and it takes him three more minutes to be able to close the door and walk inside. He’s had the heat on and running for hours now, but the inside of the house still feels cold in a sort of way he knows couldn’t even be fixed by the burn of fire itself.</p><p>Loneliness is one icy road; he slips and falls on it, head first and body second, soul parting from his body as he circles down an endless trip of ache.</p><p> </p><p><em>What died didn’t stay dead</em>.</p><p>Donghyuck lives inside the cracks lining Mark’s bones and in every breath he takes into his marred lungs. He makes a home out of the battling of his eyelashes and engraves the image of his sunlit smile on Mark’s retina, so he will see him even when he tries not to, no escape from the boy who’s always been his fate.</p><p>Donghyuck mingles with the juices in his stomach and laughs in the form of nausea making Mark’s chest feel tight, and when night drapes itself over the sky and leaves him trembling in hopeless desperation, he hugs Mark in the form of shapeless limbs turned into spine-wrecking shivers and tells him there is no way he will ever leave him alone.</p><p>When Mark closes his eyes, Donghyuck is all he sees—the heart shape of his pouty lips and the moles dotting his soft caramel skin, the unforgettable feeling of his tongue against Mark’s own and the healing touch of his small hands on Mark’s invisible wounds. When he closes his eyes, Donghyuck is all he sees—what he was and what he left Mark with, irreplaceable cold where he’d once burned hot and whispers telling dreams they’re still awaiting to fulfill.</p><p>Donghyuck haunts him until he becomes one with the very meaning of the word, everything else blurred except for the song he sings too closely to Mark’s eardrums. He haunts him until Mark stops being afraid and learns to bask into the pounding headache of Donghyuck reminiscing about their every story, into the feverish sweat of Donghyuck’s embrace around his freezing torso, into the heart-wrenching pain of Donghyuck boiling and melting to later fossilize in the gaps between his ribs.</p><p><em>“Write about me”</em>, Donghyuck begs rhythmically in the tune he drums against Mark’s liver, “<em>tell them there was nothing but you and I”</em>, and so Mark’s blood turns into black ink as he pours it over yellowish pages, fire to burn, ashes to come.</p><p>
  <em>What died didn't stay dead</em>
</p><p>
  <em>You're alive, you're alive in my head.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>When he stops his car by the shore after driving in static silence for kilometers on end, the ocean turns into a sea of purple fire the second time he blinks his eyes and then back to normal when he does it again, and in the turmoil brewing itself tight in the pit of his stomach, Mark knows this road to have been painted by fate.</p><p>It wasn’t his own conscience that brought him here, too tired to plan a trip out of the streets leading from his apartment block to the convenience store that’s been keeping him alive for the past few months—always too tired to do anything but pour his feelings over piling-up paper sheets and hum silent conversations with the person living inside his organs, inside his flesh, inside his bones.</p><p><em>“We are soulmates, Mark,”</em> Donghyuck one night scratched against the walls of his chest, the words he would always say now forever engraved in his every breath, <em>“I can’t just leave you alone.”</em></p><p>
  <em>And if I didn't know better</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I'd think you were singing to me now</em>
</p><p>
  <em>If I didn't know better</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I'd think you were still around</em>
</p><p>It was Donghyuck’s voice that brought him here, sounding certain as he’d told him how he’d <em>love to see the caves at the back of the beach</em> one more time before departing, disgrace dawning upon Mark as he’d felt him packing his bags and getting ready to leave the shelter he’d found in the afterlife of the inside of Mark’s ribcage—because Donghyuck could not stay forever, some unnameable force demanding him to go back to the place reserved even for spirits as wild as his own, because Mark’s body is a vessel and not home despite the knowledge of his every ridge and twist and bone.</p><p>And Mark would love to believe himself crazy, to think of the voice inside his head a desperate quest of his brain at stopping his pain and not Donghyuck’s aching soul mingling with his own—but the caress of the ocean breeze against his cheeks feels too much like that of Donghyuck’s calloused hands, and the sound of the waves reaching shore mimics his lullabies until he no longer knows to tell dream apart from fact, a spiral of hopeless want that leads him to follow the steps Donghyuck’s voice dictates straight into his brain stem.</p><p>The sun starts setting on the horizon, and sometimes Mark sees that the sky is pink and that others it is green, gone insane or wide awake with delirium, and from inside one of the caves deep into the belly of the cliff, destiny calls him with the inevitability of all things real.</p><p>
  <em>I know better</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But I still feel you all around</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know better</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But you're still around</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Donghyuck leaves his body and his brain when Mark steps into the humid darkness of the cave, and for the first time since his boyfriend passed away seven months ago, Mark feels truly alone. His voice does not reply to his desperate calls and his arms do not hold Mark upright when his legs threaten to let him crumble, but when his vision starts to turn black around the edges with the lack of strength finally taking ahold of his core, Donghyuck stands in front of him with the halo of divinity shining gentle yellow around him to hold a hand out for Mark to take.</p><p>“Come with me, please,” Donghyuck tells him, and his voice travels through Mark’s bloodstream and fills his heart with honey, “I can’t bear to leave you behind,” and Mark—</p><p> </p><p>At last, everything turns white—the inside of the cave, the inside of his mind, the back of his eyes.</p><p>When Mark opens them again, his head is resting on Donghyuck’s lap, and he does not pay any attention to the world fluttering around them, to the amber skies witnessing their crime; for he gets lost in his eyes and his lips and the touch of his fire skin burning alive underneath his fingertips.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>thank you so much for reading! please leave kudos and/or comment if you enjoyed this story, and you can find me on <a href="https://twitter.com/hanniecuqui">twt</a> and <a href="https://curiouscat.me/peekatom">cc</a> &lt;3.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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